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Kelly Lauren Jessup
“Hey, kid, where you headed?” the trucker called out, and Kelly tightened her grip on the backpack slung over one shoulder.
“California,” she answered, but her throat was tight, and it came out in a squeak. The trucker jerked her head at Kelly and said, “Hop in.”
Her heart was pounding and her hands were sweating as she pulled herself up into the cab. It’s a woman, she reassured herself. The first rule she had made when she’d taken the bus across town from the mall two hours ago was that she would only take rides from women.
The trucker’s name was Della, and she talked about her pet pugs all the way along Route 14 into Wyoming. Kelly listened politely, and once she started to get hungry, she thought about her mother’s great lasagna and her father’s fantastic omelets. When she began to get tired, she thought about her sister, asleep in the twin bed across the room from Kelly’s identical one. Kelly’s stuffed animals would be lined up and undisturbed tonight.
They stopped at a rest area just past the state line. Kelly went to the bathroom and bought a Snickers bar. She threw the wrapper away when she was done, because her parents had taught her not to litter.
Her voice squeaked again on the telephone, but her mother began to cry, and Kelly knew she’d heard her. “Mom,” she said, “Mom, I want to come home now.”
The Casey That Zeke Left Behind
Casey knew that he once had been a person who had gone to school and had friends and done the things that normal teenagers did, but even when he puzzled over the artifacts of that other Casey, he could never make them fit with the person he was now, and this was the only Casey he knew.
“This was your camera,” his mother told him. “Do you remember how to use it to take a picture?” But she might as well have been asking him to fly to the moon. Casey didn’t understand how a device could make a photograph, and he took it all apart trying to understand. His mother cried when she saw what he’d done, and then he cried, too.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I couldn’t find the pictures in it.”
“It’s all right, sweetie,” his mother reassured him. “Maybe we’ll try with a different camera some other time.”
Casey knew he had been ill, that he’d been a hospital, but his memories of those events were unclear as well. There were white rooms and needles and men in suits, and that was all he could ever bring up. Sometimes his mother asked him questions about the hospital, but he never seemed to be able to tell her the things she wanted to know.
What Casey liked best of all was to paint, to take a nice, big white piece of paper and cover it in swirling blues and greens. He knew all his pictures looked alike, but he didn’t care. His mother did, though.
“What is this, Casey?” she would ask, pointing to the creeping, crawling, slithering forms that came out from the center of the paper. “What are you trying to paint for me?”
Casey didn’t know, but he couldn’t stop himself from painting it for her, over and over again.
Murder in the Second Degree, Three Counts
“You don’t have any bodies,” Zeke said with scorn, even while his lawyer gestured at him to shut up. “You don’t even know if they’re dead. How are you going to charge me with murder?”
“Watch me,” the prosecutor said coldly, so he did. He watched right up through the moment the foreman pronounced, “Guilty,” three times in a row, and then he sat blinking behind the defendant’s table, wondering what the hell had just happened.
Twenty-five years is a long, long time when you’re 18. Even with good behavior, he would be at least 40 by the time he saw a world without barbed wire again. There was a strange, hollow sensation in the pit of Zeke’s stomach all the time now, and his hands shook.
His parents surprised him by being there for the trial, though not by paying for the top-notch lawyer. They’d always been willing enough to write a check to cover their parenting costs.
“There are ways out of this still,” his mother said after the verdict. “If you’re smart about this.”
“What, an appeal?” Zeke said. “Yeah, sure, the lawyer already said we should do that.”
His father cleared his throat. “There are more direct ways out, Zeke,” he said. “You could make a deal. No one would blame you for doing it.”
Zeke didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, but the next week a man in a gray suit sat down across the visitor’s table and lit a cigarette right there underneath the No Smoking sign.
“Mr. Tyler,” the man said, and exhaled a line of smoke. “Let’s make a deal.”
Eight-Second Difference
Delilah was grim-faced and silent all the back to New Mexico. Skinner asked her what they should do with the bodies, and she tersely said, “Burn them.”
“Should we tell anyone?” someone else asked. “Should we let the Rosado couple know?”
“I don’t care,” Delilah said, and she didn’t.
Back at the trailers, she locked herself in a bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. She leaned her forehead against the mirror and thumped gently, rhythmically against it. She guessed she started tapping not-so-gently at some point because the mirror broke and her forehead bled and Skinner kicked down the door and held her down while someone gave her a shot.
Her mouth was dry and her head hurt when she woke up and stumbled from a bed she’d somehow gotten into. She fumbled her way to the kitchen and drank two glasses of water without pause. When she finished, she looked up to see the kid, the creepy one, Gibson, watching her.
“Did they--” she asked, and then was too terrified to continue.
“They didn’t burn the bodies,” he said. “Skinner didn’t think you knew what you were saying.”
They were in another trailer, and someone had cleaned them up, though nothing could be done about the bruises in the shape of Zeke’s hands around Casey’s neck. She couldn’t even see anything wrong with Zeke now that someone had cleaned away the blood and gore that had clotted his hair.
“You look so different,” she told them. “You don’t look like I remember at all,” and she began to cry. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she wept. “I’m so sorry we were too late.”
Four-Minute Difference
After she’d finished talking, Mr. Rosado squeezed Stokely’s hand and walked out of the kitchen. He came back with a business card and the cordless phone, and Stokely had one horrific moment when she thought, He doesn’t believe me, I’ve done it now, I’ve ruined it all, and they’re about to send me off to that place Casey got sent away to, but then Mr. Rosado turned the card to better see it as he dialed, and Stokely saw the words, “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“Yes, I’m calling for Agent Mulder,” Mr. Rosado said into the phone, and then continued, sounding greatly relieved. “Agent Mulder, yes, my name is John Rosado. I live in Herrington, Ohio, and you came to see my son and foster daughter last fall. Yes, yes, you remember. Yes, that’s right.” Mr. Rosado took a shuddering breath and took one of Stokely’s hands in his again.
“Agent Mulder, I think we need your help,” he said. “I think we need your help right away.”
Behind them, the kitchen door banged shut as Matthew came in, grubby and exuberant after his soccer game, and Stokely smiled and greeted him, but she never stopped holding Mr. Rosado’s hand so tightly that her knuckles were white.
“Are you better now, Stokely?” Matthew asked, because she’d been sick that afternoon, she knew that was why he asked.
“I am, Mattie,” she said. “Everything is better now.”